If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes
upon a table, of different shapes,--some circular, some
triangular, some square, some oblong,--and the persons acting
these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally
find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the
oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed
himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the
doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say
they were almost made for each other.
- Sydney Smith, Sketches of Moral Philosophy
(p. 309)

A good man and a wise man may at times be angry with the world,
at times grieved for it; but be sure no man was ever discontented
with the world who did his duty in it.
- Robert Southey

So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam
(LXXII, 1)

The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the
reflection of his own face. Frown at it and it will in turn look
sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind
companion.
- William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist.
- Francis Thompson, Hound of Heaven (l. 126)

Anchorite, who didst dwell
With all the world for cell!
- Francis Thompson, To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster
(st. 5)

For, if the worlds
In worlds enclosed should on his senses burst . . .
He would abhorrent turn.
- James Thomson (1), The Seasons--Summer
(l. 313)

Heed not the folk who sing of say
In sonnet said or sermon chill,
"Alas, alack, and well-a-day!
This round world's but a bitter pill."
We too are sand and careful; still
We'd rather be alive than not.
- Graham R. Tomson (pseudonym of Rosamund Marriott Watson), Ballade of the Optimist